I was screwing around in Barnes & Noble with some friends near the end of the summer leading to college. I was joking about this or a similar list of things to do with AOL CDs, and an employee overheard me wondering if I could run out with a box. "Just go ahead and take 'em. We get paid for putting them out, so it's not like we care. We usually throw them around the store at night anyways."

I grabbed up several boxes - free stuff is always cool - and left, figuring that maybe not all employees there would agree with this. After a brief period of trying to hock them on the street outside with no success, I took them home over the loud objections from my friends of their uselessness. See, I had a Clever Plan.

Having heard about someone who used excess music CDs as wallpaper, I figured the hundreds of free AOL CDs could be better used to decorate my dorm, label side down of course. Since I drove to college, bringing them along was not a problem.

Putting them up was. My room was cozy yet spacious, but most unfortunately a double. While my roommate was a cool guy (except sometimes when drunk - then I wanted to perform medical experiments on him), this meant there was very few places to put the CDs. Finally, I decided on my bedshelf, a five foot high space for a mattress, pillows, blankets, me and not much else. Beyond being physically dangerous in the morning (Falling off something's a good way to completely wake up), the bedshelf disappointed me in various ways, and caused some literal headaches once and twice when I attempted to surmount my problems.

When I had free time during the school week, I put up a line of CDs using bluetack, and then ran out of adhesive. It looked nice, especially when the sun or a laser pointer hit it, but somehow not what I imagined. I realized that if I extended the line down, I would rub the CDs off the wall in my sleep. Other potential sleeping situations would just be worse. So I reluctantly decided to wait on the project. Things dragged on, and shit happened. I showed that single line of CDs to a few people, but nowhere near as many as I had wished. And so when I stumbled around in a depressed state of mind preparing to go home, I ripped down only that one line of CDs.

So now it is summer, and I still have the box of CDs. Sitting in my room, they're an interesting reminder of college. But next year I have a single. And a real bed. And I'm driving to college again.

I did a very similar thing to what dragoon did...my friend and I were playing in the student union of our wonderful university and saw a whole box of AOL CD's lying on the floor. My friend is a klepto, so we ran out of the union with them. We had about 400 discs (we counted). Then we took them all out of their plastic, threw all the packaging away (finding out in the meantime that they all have the exact same password/access number codes on them), and tiled the ceiling of my dorm room with them. My roommates, though not all cool at the time, were cool with mirrored ceilings. This worked for a while but the masking tape didn't hold. :(

There are those, the legendary casian artisans, who have elevated AOL CD destruction to a spiritual experience. Although I have not yet reached enlightenment, I have followed the many spiraled path, the path that leads to the end of the AOL as we know it and the rebirth of the great slumbering daemon.

Put one CD on the back of the sprocket and one cd on front. The added CD is necessary for a tight fit. The clockface will fit through the middle of the front CD, and through the sprocket and finally through the CD on the back. In layman’s terms, just stick the clockface through all the holes and tighten everything down and you’re done. You may need to add some washers to make the holes smaller, depending on the type of clock kit you obtained.

Overall time for completion: ~ 10 minutes. Looks great and makes a great gift.